Even now I hear the thunder.

We, the Altai, traversed the sierra after leaving the great plains of Eritrea. The storm had surprised us in the open between the mountains, so we had to take cover in a nearby cave. We slept covering our bodies with dry goat skins and blankets woven with leaves inside our improvised tents, shivering.

Enui died on the first day of winter, weeks ago. Her long, ashen hair was kept by her father and he made a collar from it for himself. Her body remains there, in a cave at the foot of the mountain, to sleep for all eternity sheltered by the giant rocks.

He remained seated outside the tent, looking at the mouth of the cave where all of us, the tribe, rested, he himself gazing at the dark clouds in the sky, and the thunders that called the pouring.

We had abandoned the great plains. The wind was too tempestuous and the game was too scarce. I remember how I loved the sun that seemed to want to remain forever in a sunset, just before the cold nights arrived and we had to get back to our tents to sleep.

Mother and father took the vigil and patrolled the camp, whispering like the rustle of the wind, as not to alert the old bisons, the wild horses and the old foxes. And also not too wake us up, the children.

I remember seeing the old ghosts in the shadows of my ger when I was alone with my brother. Their dark forms flickering with the beating of our hearts, laughing at me, hushing some secrets I tried to hear and understand, but never did, because everytime I thought they were about to tell me something, the loud snores of my brother announced the arrival of the morning. He opened his eyes, as if he always had been awake. And I remember his sweet voice, now lost to the echoes of time:

"Hello, Li. Brother."

But those weeks he didn't wake up, nor did I look for the secrets in the shadows. The stormclouds had descended and found their way into the cavern. Mother had left to the mountain, and father stood there, at the entrance of the cave, with anxiety darkening his face. The scars on his skin soured with the flicker of the thunder.

"I saw the second moon rising," he told us when we looked for him. "I'm going to look for your mother."

He left carrying with him his old, crumbling axe, he himself covered only with the skin of an old bison, coughing. We heard his asthmatic breathing, but didn't say anything. My brother took me besides our tent and started the fire.

"Li. Remember the fox?" and grinned. He was my younger brother. "So, do you like it better here, or in the plains?"

I didn't answer his question. Only looked at the entrance of the cave and said;

"Father is tired. His lungs are dying. Where is mother?"

"Father will be fine. He will always be fine. So will mother, Li. Those oldbones refuse to die." And he stirred the fire. "So, do you remember the fox, Li, or not?"

Seeing I didn't answer him, he stood up and left to our tent to get some dried meat to eat. While I observed the storm outside, the fire grew dim, and finally died in a few seconds.

When my brother came back with a patch of meat, he looked at me and the dead fire, and sighed.

"Li. The fire died. Can you... eh. Start it again?"

As I looked at him with curiosity, I reached for the dry sticks and gathered some broken leaves in my palm. I was about to start spinning, when my brother talked again.

"No, the other way..."

My brother. The only one I had through the eras! Son of my mother and my father. I still see his big, twinkling grey eyes looking at me, expectantly. So I uttered the Name, the only one I knew then:

"Fire"

And in my palm, a little, languid flame was slowly born, timidly creaking. It was almost invisible and in the point of extiguishing, but my brother looked at it with his big eyes, and laughed. Enui's father, there at the entrance of the cave, also looked, and remained silent.

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And so I started the fire again, invoking the Name, while my brother talked about our adventures in the plains, and the old cunning fox we used to tail, while eating the dried meat and covering ourselves, seated there, with the woven leaves. Father had left to look for mother in the storm.

So started our life in the mountains.

* * *

My brother slept in my lap as I watched the fire. "Where is father?" I asked myself. The storm howled as the tribe slept; even Enui's father had entered his to sleep besides his wife.

"Why is this night so long?"

Sometimes, when everything was silent, and the tribe slept, I heard the whispers of the World. Blurry images and names drifted around me. That night, I remembered my mother.

I had been born on the travel from the vast caves of the Ankara to the great plains of Eritrea. A languid, little baby everyone thought would die.

Those years half of the tribe had died in the winter of the Tundra where my ancestors, my grandfathers, had lived before parting to Ankara.

My mother had been nothing more than a feeble sack of bones with a swollen belly one could mistake with the harshness of hunger, and where my father, as young as he was, had acquired the phtisis that would consume his lungs the rest of his life. She was fifteen that year, and he was sixteen.

I was born in a tent in the outskirts of the great plains, were grew the rock forests, beneath a giant rock that sheltered us from the wild winds. My mother could hold me with her two hands cupped. I was breathing with difficulty, and didn't have the strenght to cry or to even wail. I struggled just to stay alive.

The elders told them to let me die at the top of a nearby hill, as to become a friendly spirit of nature that would bless them in their travel, because I was destined to die soon.

And they left me here, in a little straw cot bedded with leaves. It started to rain, so they went back to the tents beneath the rocks. Only my mother remained there with me. And when we were alone atop the hill, with the rain, then I started to cry. So she called me Li, that means Rain.

My brother was born three years later, when we already lived in the plains. The tribe had found a relative prosperity; while the game was too scarce and the winds blew too wildly, the sunsets were warm and the nights were filled with the cold, twinkling stars, and almost never rained.

The relative lack of food also meant that the worst predators we had to care about were the astray puma, or the slithering snakes. The foxes, sly as they were, only looked at us from afar, and their thieving eyes closed dissapointedly at the realization that we, the Altai, were even more miserable than them. Our skinny frames, the sad gazes. The men that drowned in soma, the woman with withered bosoms and varicose legs.

I imagine our fleshes were distasteful for even the hungry vultures that roamed the skies. From roaming so much, our flesh was coarse and sour, lacking the tiniest trace of tenderness. My brother always used to say, those years, with the dried meat in his hands: "Look. This is probably moister than we are" and showed us his thigh, and laughed.

But while our fleshes were weary of the roads, our hearts were warm, and we knew each other as we knew ourselves.

Even more so him, always laughing and calling the winds, climbing the great rocks in the rock forest where we used to set up the tents. "Wind! Wind!" or the grass. If there was one person that, through all the eras, knew the Name, it was him. It was as if all the simplicity of the world was his.

Alas, the Name never heard him. And he always asked me to teach him how to lit up the fire with a word, or to slowly move the winds when the clouds mounted.

His name was Ji, that means Grass that's slowly sprouting through the rough terrain. He was my only brother. The only one that knew the Name as I did.